Joseph Wright of Derby, Antigonus in the Storm, 1734-1797. Art Gallery of Ontario.
There is a bear in this picture. If you can’t see it, that’s ok, I can’t either (and I’ve been squinting at it for a good five minutes), but I know it’s there because I beheld the original painting at the Art Gallery of Ontario a few months ago, in the company of twelve Canadian healthcare providers. If memory serves (and mine certainly doesn’t always), the bear is on the lower right.
The bear waited for about twenty minutes of discussion time to pass before it emerged from the shadows into view. Why such a belated arrival? Perhaps our eyes needed the time to adjust to the tones of the painting’s lower third, so as to be able to discriminate the form of the chestnut bear from its umber surroundings. Or perhaps our interests first needed to work through the picture’s show-stopping acts: the artist’s use of lighteningrod lines; the invitation for awe at humankind’s relationship to nature; the wateriness of it all; the possibility of hope (the heaving boat is, after all, close to the shore. And look in the distance: light. Warmth.). In comparison to all that, the bear is a wallflower at best (sorry, Bear). In any case, arriving at the bear required real time.
Oh yeah, there’s a bear there.
That observation changed the whole picture. It brought us back to the man in the foreground, infusing tension: all of a sudden he was standing in alarmingly close proximity to a prancing beast. It prompted us to revisit our understanding of the narrative, and to question the artist’s intention. “You know,” said one participant, “that bear seems to me quite small and non-threatening. I wonder if it’s supposed to be a comic role. Or maybe that’s a baby bear and, watch out, because mama is probably on her way.”
Finding the bear was a revelation, but not in the sense it unlocked the painting and told us what it all means. Rather than closing the deal, this compelling wrinkle broke the ice into a whole new perception of things. It asked us to check our thinking, and enchanted us into continued wonder about the painting, one that lasted even after we’d said what we needed to say. Works of art are not, after all, whodunnits, so much as they are great characters in our lives.
In my opinion, the real revelation was that the bear brought the learning back to ourselves as viewers, as interpreters of the world and, this group, as caregivers. I can’t believe we are only noticing that now.
Caregivers are trained in goal-oriented observation. I call this “looking for.” Looking for signs of this. Looking for milestones towards that. Looking for deficits to this. Looking for absences of that.
Looking for is one of our greatest perceptive powers, and, in my opinion, the one that’s most linked to one’s authority as a viewer. It’s driven by direction and aggression. I don’t mean aggression in a negative way, but rather the healthy will to pursue and create that lives at the core of human innovation and discovery. That kind of aggression; it’s the bomb and the berries. It’s bearhunting, the way experienced bearhunters do it. And while a particularly powerful tool for solving problems quickly that works a lot of the time, looking for also rules out the big picture, sometimes far too early in the discovery process. By nature, the laser-focused looking is limited.
If all we do is look for look for look for …we end up in a tunnel, looking for signs of the end.
The good news is that we already possess within our capacity as viewers an expanded set of tools, ready for use, in addition to goal-oriented looking. We can also look at (simply behold and take in information). We can look with, leveraging the varied resources of the perspectives of others. We can look after, following where the data takes us (I love how “look after” also stands as a phrase for care, as in looking after a child. And oh my dear lord it is so nice to sit here in a space of quiet and write this as other gloriously skilled people look after my children). And we can look again, and again, and again.
All of these styles of looking are really styles of thinking. Undergirding the skills of cognitive agility is mindset: patience, trust in the authority of others’ perspectives to shape what we know, acknowledgment of the limits of our knowledge. “I will continue to attune with an open ear to whatever feedback and input is available,” wrote one participant, six gallery-hours and a day following our encounter with this work, “so that my eye does not miss the bear.” Pagan Kennedy’s recent article on serendipity provokes me to think our mindset towards luck may also play a role.
In my opinion, one great opportunity of art-viewing is in developing agility in these styles of thinking. Such flow between various ways of seeing offers sweet relief from the tunnel vision that plagues healthcare today. Quality practice in healthcare must by nature involve excellence in the looking for abilities of great bearhunters, but in addition, capacities in a much wider range of attentive practices.
And this takes time. The truth is, it took us so long to find the bear because we did not set out to hunt for one in the first place (and if we had, we’d probably have gotten there very quickly with contention for world’s most boring bearhunt). Instead, we’d set out to explore. Our mission was to go beyond our knowledge, trusting in the art, in one another, and in our human tools. And that process delivered a trove of information and questions, a discovery or two, and some serendipity along the way – among it all, a bear of a reminder as to the potential, and limits, of our respective views.
Learn more about this work of art here.
And enjoy some of the other highlights from our intensive in the galleries at AGO (sculpture-heavy for these palpatory practitioners):
Manaski Akpaliapik, Respecting the Circle, 1989, Bone, ivory and stone.
Evan Penney, Stretch #1, silicone, pgment, hair, fabric, aluminium.
Thanks to Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College for organizing this workshop.
